


crawl a mile in a desolate place

by SerpaSas



Series: trial by erosion [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Ableist Language, Addiction recovery, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon Queer Character, Drug Addiction, Family Bonding, Gen, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Prostitution, M/M, Mild Gore, No Apocalypse, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Recovery, Sibling Bonding, Therapy, in that Klaus sees dead people and fought in a war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 06:49:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18026822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerpaSas/pseuds/SerpaSas
Summary: After they don’t stop the apocalypse, time travel, almost get stuck in their childhood bodies, and then do stop the apocalypse with, fuck, Klaus doesn’t know, the power of sibling love and understanding, things are…Notgood, never that— but something else, something not bad. Something better than they’d ever had with each other, anyways.





	crawl a mile in a desolate place

**Author's Note:**

> So, The Umbrella Academy ate my brain. Predictably, I wrote a thing about Klaus, and him and these ridiculous siblings being family.

After they don’t stop the apocalypse, time travel, almost get stuck in their childhood bodies, and then do stop the apocalypse with, fuck, Klaus doesn’t know, the power of sibling love and understanding, things are…

Not _good_ , never that— thirty years ago they were born to women who hadn’t planned on being suddenly nine months pregnant with no warning and had so little clue how to deal with the sudden baby they didn’t ask for or even have time to prepare for they sold them to a crazy old man dressed like the Monopoly guy who showed up out of nowhere, who then trained them as superheroes and one brother ran and another brother _died_ and they had fallen apart, whatever connection they had to each other shattering and leaving them separate, scattered. Until the old man offed himself and brought them back together, until Five finally came back forty-five years older with a mission to stop the apocalypse, until Vanya learned the truth their father hid for years and carried out said apocalypse. Until they undid it and managed to stop her from causing another one.

So, not good. But something else, something not bad. Something better than they’d ever had with each other, anyways.

And Klaus stays clean. Two days turns to three, and four, and five, and— well, it keeps going. Ben is proud. Diego is proud. Allison and Vanya and Five and Luther are proud. And now, in this strange new dynamic the six of them— actually, seven, now that sometimes, on occasion, now that he’s getting the knack of the new sides of his powers, the others can _see_ Ben (which is just— he stopped mentioning that Ben was there to the others long before he left, even if he never hid talking to him, because they never believed him. They knew Klaus couldn’t see the dead when he was fucked up, and after they lost Ben he had given up on ever being _not_ fucked up. He didn’t know how to explain that the rules were different, for Ben, for some reason. He was there even when Klaus had a fistful of pills in his bloodstream, he didn’t carry the wounds from his death through the afterlife, he— was just different. Until Klaus’ hands glowed blue, he didn’t fully believe it wasn’t something _Ben_ was doing to be able to touch things, move them)— they try their best to actually express that pride. None of them are even close to approaching good at it, but, you know. One day at a time.

But yeah. Klaus is clean and sober, taking metaphorical sobriety chips left and right, because NA was all well and good but there wasn’t a group in the world set up for people like him, and the whole ‘anonymous’ thing went out the window anyways if he explained what he could do without being another schizo. But hey, he doesn’t need it. He has his own support system, they’re just all superpowered siblings, a monkey butler, and a robot mom living in a mansion they once longed to escape from and was once completely destroyed around their ears.

.

Ben is as he always has been, telling him not to do the thing he’s thinking of doing and being encouraging and proud when he doesn’t do the thing. He cheers Klaus on when he passes a bar or liquor store and doesn’t go in. He’s there when Klaus wakes up from nightmares that used to just be the dead but now are increasingly mixed in with A Shau and the faces of men not yet dead but almost there, of bombs and bullets and fire. He listens to Klaus talk about the war, the first part of his life Ben hasn’t been there for— he’s only missed a few weeks before, when he first died, and a day here and there when he got sick of Klaus pissing his life away, and ten months is a hell of a gap, even if it hadn’t been ten months where he fought a brutal, bloody war and also fell in love.

Luther is awkward as shit and slightly condescending, but in light of the whole ‘being the trigger for the apocalypse by locking their sister in a nightmare room’ thing he’s trying to be better at the brother thing. He’s not terribly good at it, but the kicked puppy look a man with the body of an ape shouldn’t be able to give when he realizes he messed up, along with his new habit of saying things like ‘sorry’, Klaus is forgiving that particular flaw, anyways.

Allison’s voice is still gone, not jumped far enough back that her throat hadn’t been cut (is it weird they just… hijacked their past selves’s bodies? Is it? Five keeps spouting math-y explanations like what he’s saying is obvious and then snorting, making some crack about their intelligence, and then saying something like “the math doesn’t lie” and phasing away. Klaus is just rolling with it and being grateful they didn’t have to kill their past selves and take their place, or something equally as sci fi horror bullshit, like their aren’t sci fi horror bullshit enough already) but they share clothes and gossip like they did when they were kids and she’ll write smily faces on her notepad for him when he makes a joke and he gets her markers of a bunch of different colours, even shiny metallic ones, to write with other than just plain old black. 

Vanya is a pleasant surprise, a comradeship of being the overlooked and forgotten siblings, of being locked in places that scared the hell out of them, of discovering and learning to manage new powers. They work on them together, her trying to not destroy things and him trying to make Ben solid and visible, trying to draw in one specific ghost. She learns to pick up her violin again and the sound of it soothes him when the world is too sharp and rough and the dead are screaming, and not even the dead people he _likes_.

Diego is… he and Diego have always had a different kind of relationship. The only one he saw after he left home, getting dragged in by the cops his brother hung around for being publicly drunk, for shoplifting, for whatever new shit Klaus was getting up to when the wrong cop rolled up. Diego was always the one to give the least fight before bending to his will— sure, he’d say no and bitch the whole time, but he didn’t actually _stop him_ , tell him to fuck off like he very easily could have. He followed Klaus into the veteran’s bar and jumped into the fight Klaus started and wouldn’t let him blow off the question when he wanted to know what the hell was going on with him. He does the same thing now, listens to Klaus talk about Dave 

Five is as he always was, rude and arrogant and convinced he’s always right, but now he gets mistaken for Klaus’ son more often than not and will talk to him about Saigon during the war, or the jungles of Vietnam, where he apparently killed some people. That’s okay: Klaus killed his fair share of people there, too.

.

He’s walking home from a clothing store with Allison one day, because shopping together is now a thing they apparently do, even though she frames it as a way to get him to stop stealing her clothes, when there is a loud, sharp noise, and Klaus automatically drops because there’s a sniper and no cover for a dozen feet at least, so he’s gotta crawl to that there car, even though it’s not a jeep which is weird, hey, but one of the old army jeeps would be just as weird in 2019, and wait, wait, why was there a sniper in 2019—

Allison is crouched down next to him, waving her notepad in his face. ARE YOU OK? it reads, in unusually messy writing, for her.

“Uhhhh…” he says, and it’s about then he realizes he had thrown himself to the ground because a car backfired, or someone slammed a dumpster, or set off a firecracker, or maybe they did shoot a gun but it’s fucking New York and that’s not rare. It’s not a fucking _sniper_. “I’m good?” He tries.

Allison scribbles something down and shows it to him, the writing much more like her normal writing. It says ~~WTF~~ and then says WHAT WAS THAT??? She flips back to ARE YOU OK? and taps it with her marker. She’s using one of the metallic markers Klaus had got her, a shimmering gold.

“I’m…” he trails off, looking for a convenient reason why he would have thrown himself to the ground and is still breathing kind of panicky. He comes up short. One of the many, many things he misses about being fucked up all the time is no one questioning this shit.

“Tell her, you dumbass,” Ben says from where he’s standing over them like the world’s rudest guardian angel. Well, God was pretty rude, too, so probably Her angels would be.

“I… _might_ have thought there was a sniper.”

She writes SNIPER?

He rolls over onto his back but doesn’t get up. There are people walking past, some giving them a weird look but most not sparing a glance. Klaus loves this city: a movie star crouched over a junkie in a very stylish dress sprawled on the ground, and it’s nowhere near the weirdest thing they’ll see today. “You know. Some NVA— North Vietnamese— fuck, the people I fucking fought in the fucking war.” Klaus had thought that the junkies and dealers and criminals he had hung around before had sworn a lot, but it had nothing on military men. His vocabulary had gotten very much more cuss filled in the ten months he was there.

Allison looks taken aback, which is fair. They’re all sort of taken aback when they remember Klaus fought on the front lines of A Shau, which is also fair. They’d been through their fair share of violence and danger as children, but Klaus had always stayed out of the fighting as much as he could— his power isn’t offensive by any means, nor is it really defensive. Until an AK got shoved into his hands and _he_ got shoved onto the line, he had never really fought someone. He had left one day that person and come back a few later a soldier, someone who had put bullets in other humans and left friends to rot in jungles, who had put the emergency first aid that had been drilled into them as children to use when the medics didn’t come, had felt the life drain out of boys far too young to be fighting and killed boys even younger, had watched the love of his life go still behind the eyes.

Klaus left their house one day (was kidnapped) and three days later he crawled out of hell.

Allison goes to write something but hesitates, pen hovering over the paper. Klaus lets his eyes drift to the sky. Ben stares down at him. He covered his eyes with his arm, unable to take the look of concern.

Allison pokes him and he uncovers his eyes to look up towards her notepad. WHAT DO YOU NEED? it reads, and isn’t that a question. He needs to stop having flashbacks, he needs a drink, he needs Dave to show the fuck up, he needs a pill or a line or a needle in his arm.

He needs people to stop forgetting he’s fresh out of war, fresh off of losing Dave. They remember the recovering addict thing, which is nice to have support on, but it’s only the tip of his issues, right now. Even ignoring the war vet thing, being clean for weeks and weeks means he has to remember all the shit he did and had done to him the past decade. Every asshole who didn’t like the way he dressed or wore makeup or sucked dick and let him know with vicious words he never took to heart because they had nothing on the man he called dad and punches and kicks that were harder to ignore, every time he sucked someone off for a hit or shacked up with someone for a place to sleep, inevitably getting kicked out or punched out, always stealing something in return as he beat his retreat.

But none of that is what Allison is really asking, and she doesn’t deserve to learn the depths of her brother’s depravity while crouched on a dirty sidewalk.

“I need…” he swallows. He’s a recovering junkie ‘Nam war vet who’s starting to be followed by bloodied ghosts begging for his help or so far gone they just scream (one good side effect: almost all the alleys his dealers hang out in also have brutally murdered ghosts). He has a childhood full of abuse and neglect. “I need a fucking therapist or something, holy shit.” The words said aloud are shocking enough to take him aback, even though he said them.

Allison’s pad reads WE SHOULD ALL GET THERAPISTS and then BUT YEAH, REALLY YOU

It’s a breakthrough, of some kind. A breakthrough on the cold cement ground, with a ghost and a movie star with no voice hovering over him. “Yeah,” he says, “I really do need one of those.”

.

One afternoon, Klaus is sitting on the couch minding his own business (fantasizing about taking a drink, just a sip, just a glass, just enough to dull some of the edges off the world) when Five phases in right next to him.

While he is experiencing cardiac distress, Five asks, apropos of nothing, “You ever worry about all that Agent Orange you must have took in?”

Five has been out of sorts since they did the thing he’s been working towards for forty-five years, which has led to him possibly redirecting all the worry he poured into the apocalypse into… well, really, whatever pops into his head.

He continues, “The Commission took all these precautions before they sent me there. Protecting their best agent and all. Guessing you didn’t have those.”

Klaus says, mildly, after his heart slows to a somewhat normal rate, “I figure that poison will have to fight all the other poison I’ve ingested over the years for the right to kill me first, so it’s not my chief concern, no.”

Five only looks at him, unimpressed. “Hmm. So you are aware of what all those drugs were doing to you, I wasn’t sure.”

And that’s the thing about little/old Five— he’s pretty sure it’s impossible to phase (hah) the guy. They talked shop about different AK rifles as opposed to M1s and he didn’t show a bit of surprise that _Klaus_ , of all people, was so well versed. He complained about foot rot, and Five bragged about the boots and extra socks he was issued when he was in the jungles. Klaus yelled at apparently thin air to fuck off when a ghost popped up and Five didn’t blink. Klaus guesses Five was probably used to hearing things no one else could, if Delores was any sign.

He sighs, rubs a hand over his face. “Of course I knew. Just weighed how much I value my organs against how much I like the drugs. Wasn’t that hard a choice.” That, of course, leaves out how, after his second time of waking up in an ambulance with burns on his chest from the paddles they used to restart his heart, he realized, truly, what he was doing to himself. But by the time he ducked out of the ER he was sobering up enough that the dead were starting to close in and withdrawal was sitting uncomfortably in every inch of his body. It wasn’t a hard choice, with nothing and no one to give him reason to quit. He knows you can’t get sober, truly, permanently sober, unless you want to do it for yourself, but Klaus doesn’t think he could ever want something else for himself unless he had something to want. 

On the list of things he thought he could end up caring about enough about to quit, his siblings and a dead boyfriend from the Vietnam war would have been pretty low on his guesses. But it’s pretty damn nice, now he has it. 

.

After an evening of his own personal one violin concert, Vanya sits next to him where he’s sprawled out on the couch. He’s wearing his army vest again, a comforting item of clothing despite it being from a war. The therapist he just started seeing would probably say something about his mind still being stuck in patterns of being a soldier, except he hasn’t told her about the whole ‘time travelled to 1968 Vietnam war and stayed there ten months’ thing yet. They’re starting on the superpowers and non-hallucination ghosts and working out from there.

Vanya reaches out and almost touches his arm, right where his tattoo is, before pulling back. She’s still so hesitant, with everything and everyone. The blind rage she used to destroy the world is still there, obviously, but hidden underneath the fear. Klaus gets that; for most of his life, he’s hidden his fear underneath carelessness and drugs.

“You got that in Vietnam, right?” She asks with at least a little confidence.

He looks down at the tattoo and flexes, laughing a bit. It’s not as impressive a flex as Luther or Diego or Allison. More impressive than Five, at least, but since Five is currently in the body of a thirteen year old, even one that had been in the middle of constant physical training since age six, it’s not that much of an accomplishment. Whatever— his ability to punch has never been his thing.

“Oh yeah. Bunch of guys in my unit got ‘em, figured why the hell not? Join in the party. Might have been high.” He smiles a bit more, examining the palms of his hands, the HELLO and GOODBYE he has to get touched up every few years. He waves both hands at her. “Couldn’t exactly make the argument I didn’t like tattoos or something.”

She tilts her head at him, examining. One thing about always being shoved off into the background was that she learned to see— see everything. It’s how she managed to write a whole book, laying out their deepest, unspoken secrets and insecurities. That book took balls to write, never mind publish; as much as a pain in the ass as it had been when it first came out, being noticed as That Umbrella Kid by people for the first time in years, he can respect that. Hey, being identified as _that_ Klaus even got him some free drugs, so. Win?

“Why’d you even get those things? I mean, Ouija board, ha ha, but really. Why?”

There are a couple ways to answer that, most of them bullshit. He tries honesty, partly because his therapist has told him he should try doing that more, mostly because of the slightly lost look in his little sisters eyes (will it ever not be weird he’s the second oldest of the Hargreeves? After a life of being the exact same ages, between him and Five, they’ve got some variation up in this joint.)

He turns his arm over, looking at the umbrella tattoo on his wrist. They had gotten them so young, they had grown and stretched with them. Klaus isn’t known for being good to his body, and he _definitely_ didn’t take care of that thing. Wrist tats don’t fade as fast as palms, and the colours are dark enough and deep enough in the skin that it’s stayed present, but still; it’s not the same as it was when they first got them. He still hates it.

Klaus brings his arm up to show the tattoo to his sister, the only one who didn’t have one. Another way she was excluded, because she wanted one and they were jealous she didn’t have to get one. “I didn’t want this thing,” he explains. “I didn’t choose where I got it or when I got it, or even what design it would be. That really explains our whole childhood, right? No choice of where or when or what. So I got something I chose, because fuck that, right? My body, my choice. Etcetera.”

If anything, Vanya looks more lost. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a choice. I just kept taking those pills. For years after I left, I just… kept taking them. They didn’t even calm my nerves. They didn’t do the thing I was told they did, but I just… kept taking them, every single day.” The room shakes a little, with her emotions. Her hands are curled into fists, knuckles white.

“Hey, Vanya, breathe,” he says, doing his best impression of Dave talking men down from the edge of a panic attack, shellshocked new recruits and men who’d been there long enough for battle fatigue to settle in. He’d been so good at it, his whole presence calming as hell even in the middle of a war zone. “Come on, just breathe. In and out.”

She follows his breathing, and after a bit the room stops shaking, and he’s the only thing that is. Her whole power makes the air feel like right after a bomb had been dropped a few klicks away, the way the ground would shake under them.

Vanya exhales slowly, shutting her eyes tight. “Sorry.”

He waves that off, rolls his shoulders. “Alright?” He checks.

She nods, opens her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Deal with emotions? I’d be shocked if any of us do.”

“Not all of you have emotions that could literally cause the apocalypse, though.”

“Uh, Vanya? Remember how the rest of us spent until like an hour before the apocalypse fighting each other instead of trying to stop it?” He grins at her. “I’d say we’re fully capable of causing the end of days even without your help.”

She laughs a little wetly. “You guys _are_ pretty messed up.”

Klaus wraps an arm around her shoulders and smiles wider. “One big, messed up family.”

.

He walks in on Luther reading a book about the Vietnam war. When he sees Klaus, he shoves it out of sight like he caught him looking at a Playboy. On his bedside table is another book about PTSD in veterans.

“Klaus! Knock first!” He says, continuing to act like he was just caught with porn.

Klaus hesitates in the doorway for a split second, weighing whether harassing his brother was worth discussing why, exactly, he was reading about the war Klaus served in. Luther grabs the book off his bedside table and hides that, too. It was never really a decision; harassing people and ending up in awkward situations is his bread and butter.

“What’cha reading there, Luther?” He asks.

Luther squirms, which is quite a look on his huge body. “Nothing.”

Klaus looks at him in disbelief. “Really. You sure about that? Because I’m pretty sure I saw a book, and unless books become ghosts now… wait, do you think other things become ghosts? Why am I not being stalked by ghost squirrels?”

One of the other guys in his unit saw ghosts, too. Not when Klaus first got there, and not for a few weeks after. It should have earned him a section 8, mentally unfit, but they needed bodies to fill out the line and take the bullets and some poor bastard talking to his dead friends who’d already gone down wasn’t anywhere near enough to stop that. When Klaus couldn’t get enough booze or grass or what the fuck ever in the backstreets of Saigon, when he was just clean enough to see the dead, he’d watch the people the guy had been talking to in the corners of his eyes, their blown out skulls or blown off limbs, their olive green army duds turned to rust with their blood, and ignored them when he tried to get him to pass messages on, or just screamed like they had when they were dying.

Maybe squirrels are just smart enough, not to try to make him.

Luther huffs somewhere between amusement and exasperation, which has been a welcome change, since they did and didn’t save the world, the introduction of amusement to his dealing with Klaus. The dude is trying. It’s— nice.

He begrudgingly pulls the books back into sight. “I’m just— trying. To understand.”

And that, right there, is why Klaus can’t really hold it against him that he says stupid things, sometimes. Luther still doesn’t get addiction or why Klaus didn’t just quit years ago, why they’ve emptied out the liquor cabinet and Diego still reacts to his illegal police radio reporting dead junkies. He’s blunt, and rude, and clueless, and doesn’t understand.

But for the first time in his life, he’s trying to.

Klaus sighs, and hangs his head for a second before sitting down next to him. “Got any questions?”

.

The thing about Ben is that he’s been by Klaus’ side for literally his entire life. They had been only a few days old, when they had been brought together by their dick of an adoptive father. They hadn’t necessarily been close like other siblings might have been, but Ben was always friendly and compassionate, too much so for his own good. He was fun, too, sarcastic as hell, and he would sneak out with Klaus back before his sneaking out changed from mostly innocent preteen stuff to increasingly illegal trips for booze or drugs or parties. After his death, after he showed back up and didn’t disappear even when Klaus was high as fuck, he was his constant companion. He stayed with him even when he wished his dead brother would leave, wouldn’t watch him with those sad, disappointed eyes through the worst of his moments. Every alley he passed out in, every asshole he’d slept with for a bed or a meal or a hit, every ambulance or jail cell he’d woken up in.

So, he’d always been there, the killjoy angel on his shoulder, talking him down from a bad trip and keeping an eye out for danger Klaus wasn’t with it enough to see, doing his damnedest to get him to stop digging himself an early grave. He was there, basically every single day of his life, until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

There had been plenty of things Klaus had missed about the 21st century, when he was in ‘Nam, although not as many as one might think— honestly, most of the things he missed had been more in the category of ‘not available in a war zone’ than ‘not available in 1968’— but Ben had been the biggest. For the first few days, Klaus had felt like the world was crooked, off-balance. It had taken weeks for him to stop turning to say something to Ben or throw him a look, stop expecting his brother to scoff or laugh or make some remark about everything. Even after Dave took up that place in his life, the one he would mutter jokes about other people to or exchange glances with when dumb shit happened, he still expected Ben to be there when he woke up. He had just barely stopped expecting it when Dave had died and he had come back.

And then Ben was there again, and despite almost a whole year of being without him, it took no time for him to go right back to being with.

Ben had been freaked out, unable to find Klaus for hours until suddenly he was back, nearly catatonic and covered in blood. He had been even less willing to leave his side since. 

Then Klaus had gotten sober, and Ben started being increasingly tangible and occasionally visible. For the first time since they were teenagers, Ben got to talk to his other siblings, and even when Klaus was playing telephone they _believed_ him when he said Ben was there (it pisses Klaus off, a bit, that it took them actually seeing Ben to believe him. Those first months after he died, after Ben came back and before Klaus finally left, when he had yelled that their brother was _right there_ but he had been so goddamn high none of them took it seriously, thought he was hallucinating or lying. Their belief in him had been dying since he was twelve and stealing their dad’s expensive whiskey, thirteen and rolling joints under the table, fifteen and sneaking out to snort lines and stumbling back home in the morning with hickeys he didn’t always remember getting. The longer he was sober, the more Klaus was accepting that he had messed up whatever relationship he could have had with his siblings as much as they had. But it still hurt.)

But Ben was still there, by Klaus’ side. Even during therapy.

“Are there any ghosts here, now?” Jean asks during their fourth session.

Jean is a lovely person who seems to honestly want to help Klaus. She doesn’t deserve to know one of her patients, wrists slashed open and covered in blood, haunts her waiting room. The ghost of the patient is easy to deal with— he doesn’t seem to want anything, doesn’t beg or cry or scream. He just sits in one of the chairs like he’s eternally waiting for his next appointment.

Instead, Klaus exchanges a look with Ben, standing over her shoulder and reading her notes. “Ben’s here,” he tells her.

She hums, makes a note that makes Ben laugh. “One of your brothers, right?”

Despite being about the same age as them and thus the perfect age to have been obsessed with the Umbrella Academy as a kid, Jean doesn’t seem to really know much about them. He likes that about her. “Number Six,” he confirms, and watches as she almost manages to cover up her grimace at the reference to their number names, makes another note.

“She thinks it’s super messed up dad didn’t bother naming us until we were ten,” Ben reports, still reading her notes. “She thinks it was a way of dehumanizing us so we wouldn’t question orders.”

 _No shit_ , he thinks but doesn’t say. He tries not to talk to Ben during appointments. Jean knows what he can do, that he’s not just crazy, that Ben is real— but it’s still an adjustment for her to switch her brain over from ‘schizophrenic’ to ‘actual medium’. He’s also a little nervous that she’ll ask that Ben stop coming to their appointments. 

“Ben is with you a lot, isn’t he?” She comments mildly, leadingly.

“Pretty much constantly. The one ghost the drugs couldn’t banish.” He blows a kiss to Ben, who rolls his eyes.

Jean looks at him intently. “It’s my understanding that your self-medicating started, at least, in a large part to stop seeing the dead. You brother is different?”

Klaus looks down, away from Ben. “Of course he is. I actually want to see him.” He hesitates, glances up to see his brother watching him with a soft look on his face. “Ben was the best of us, always. When we lost him…” He swallows, heart heavy with the remembered grief of those first days, before Ben had shown back up and not disappeared no matter how drunk or high he was. He had seriously considered getting sober, just long enough to see his brother one last time, but— he hadn’t wanted to see him like _that_ , the way all ghosts appeared. He couldn’t bare to see Ben covered in blood and gore, so damaged that there hadn’t been a question about whether he had been dead. No one could survive what had happened to Ben. Between one second and the next, he had been there, making the same face he always did when Luther yelled at him to summon his monsters to win the fight, and then— gone.

They had thought it was bad enough when Five had been suddenly gone. It had nothing on that.

He swallows again, doing his best to blink away the burning behind his eyes. Ben was _right there_ , like he always was, but the horror (hah) of his death is still profoundly unfair.

“Do you think that’s why your drug use didn’t have the same effect on him?”

Ben blinks at him in surprise. “What?” He asks.

“What?” Klaus echoes, the unrelenting grief suddenly washed away with shock.

Jean shrugs. “I admit that I, obviously, don’t fully understand how your power works. But from what you’ve told me, there are very few ghosts you _want_ to see.”

He nods slowly, trying to put together what she means. “Yeah? I mean, the dead are mostly, at best, annoying as hell. But a lot of them are fucking terrifying, Jean. Or both. I don’t _want_ some guy whose insides are outside following me around harassing me day and night about solving his murder from fifty years ago.”

She just nods. “Of course. You’re not a police officer, or a detective. If you want to help them, that’s one thing, but just because you’ve been born with this power doesn’t mean you have to put _your_ wants and needs— your whole life— on hold for other people. Even disregarding your trauma, which of course has an impact on how you deal with these situations, it’s not your responsibility to sacrifice your wellbeing. You need to focus on recovery.”

And that— that is why Klaus keeps coming back every week. He had been raised with the lesson that the only valuable thing about him is his power. Not even his ability to theoretically help the dead, just use the dead to help dad and his missions, no matter the cost. When he had told Jean about the mausoleum, her normally well controlled expression had been horrified and angry for a split second before she had gotten it under control. Jean is not a fan of the old man, that’s for sure.

“It just strikes me that, perhaps, Ben doesn’t go away when you use because you don’t want him gone.”

That sounds… sort of right. They’ve mostly come to the conclusion that his new powers seem to be tied to his emotions— Ben becomes tangible easier when he’s scared or desperate for his help, when he really _wants_ it. It explains why it’s always seemed like more and more ghosts show up the more upset he is, crying in a graveyard or being tortured in a motel room. But it doesn’t sound totally right, because there were times, in his deepest, darkest times when he hadn’t wanted anything so much as he had wanted Ben to not see what he was willing to do for a fix.

When he tells Jean that, she hums in thought again, tapping her pen against her notes. “Again, I don’t know how this works, but—“ she turns her head in an attempt to look in the direction Klaus has been when he looks at Ben. She misses the mark and ends up staring in the vague direction of Ben’s left shoulder. “Ben, did you try to stay with Klaus, during those times?”

Ben huffs. “Of course I did. I wasn’t going to leave you like that, man.”

“Wait,” he says, “You _tried_ to stay with me? Like, put effort into it?”

“Sometimes, when you were…” he trails off, the words _whoring yourself out_ too much for his brother to say aloud, even when he’d been there for it, “It was like you were pushing me away. Like, physically.”

“Then why didn’t you go?” He asks, incredulous.

“You’re not the boss of me.” Ben says. Then his face softens, and he says, “And you needed me. So.”

There’s something heavy sitting in his throat, and he has to clear it twice before he can address Jean’s curious look. She has been left out of half a conversation she did, actually, start. “I think you’re onto something, doc.”

She smiles a little, then glances at the clock. “That’s time for today, Klaus. I’ll see you next week. And I assume you too, Ben.”

Ben grins, still pleased when other people talk to him. “Yeah, I’ll be here.” Then he looks at Klaus, and his smile goes softer. “I’ll always be here.”

. 

For all he can make Ben solid a good quarter of the time he tries, now, he still hasn’t been able to find Dave. The dead, after all, usually find him. He doesn’t know what it means, that Dave hasn’t.

After an evening of cursing in frustration, after he’s finally exhausted himself and is sitting on his bed, thinking about just going the fuck to sleep and hoping without hope he can dream like a normal person who can’t see the dead and wasn’t in the middle of a war less than two months ago, someone knocks and Diego sticks his head in.

Klaus wipes the frustrated tears that spilled over when he realized he wasn’t going to be seeing Dave tonight off his cheeks and looks at his brother. “Hey, man, what’s up? Come in, come in.”

Diego looks awkward as hell, which is fair. He’s never been super comfortable with tears, not even from Klaus, who has never been great at not crying, even when their father just berated him for it. But he doesn’t leave. “I, uh, heard you shouting earlier.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that, working on my powers. Didn’t go great, but you know. Try again later.” He says with false lightness.

“I figured. You were yelling at Dave.”

It’s not like Klaus never hears his name, but it still punches him in the stomach like it usually does. In A Shau, they had talked about what they would do when they left war behind, a million little daydreams of fleeing off to California and joining the hippies, getting an apartment somewhere and living quietly, moving into the woods and leaving the world behind. Klaus had vague wishes of taking Dave back to 2019, where they wouldn’t have to hide. Any of it would have been fine, perfect, amazing, as long as they were together. It would be the same even with Dave as a ghost. But Dave isn’t here.

“You were yelling that you don’t even have a picture of him.” Diego says, drawing Klaus out of thought. 

He blinks in surprise. He did sort of remember saying— well, yelling— something like that. It was true; after Dave bled out under him, he didn’t stop to grab anything but his dogtags and his patch before opening the briefcase and ending up back home. He hasn’t forgotten Dave’s face— god, he doesn’t think he ever could, never ever— but he misses seeing him. For ten months they lived out of each other’s pockets, slept in cots next to each other and sat next to each other in the mess and on the bus, fought and killed with each other. To go from that to… nothing is impossibly difficult. Until he can find Dave, because he fucking will, he’s fucking sober as shit and he will, a picture would be nice. But he doesn’t even have that.

“…yeah.” He says eventually. “Yeah, I did. Uh, just a tad frustrated with all of the him not being here.”

Diego hums, then pulls something out of the bag he carries some of bulkier crime-fighting tools in. He tosses it onto the bed next to him.

It’s a framed picture, landed picture side down.

Instead of flipping it over, because he’s suddenly terrified, he says, “You just threw that on Ben.”

“If Ben were here he’d have already said something and you would have responded or hissed or something.” Since they found out he hasn’t just been talking to the air or having drug induced hallucinations, they’ve all gotten very good at telling when Ben is with Klaus. It’d almost be annoying, if Ben didn’t light up when one of his siblings said ‘hi’ to him, even when he isn’t visible. “Pick it up, man.” When he doesn’t move, Diego sighs, walks over, picks it up, and hands it to him.

And _oh_. Oh, there he is, along with some of their dead or now older than Five friends in the picture from the vet’s bar, who he’ll be glad to have a picture of when his eyes aren’t locked on Dave’s face.

Diego sits down next to him and Klaus asks, “How…?”

He feels his brother shrug before he explains, “Broke into that bar. Figured one of those guys was Dave.” He leans in. “Which one is he?” He asks, as Ben appears on Klaus’ other side.

“Ben is here,” he says absently, then trails his fingers over the glass covering Dave’s face. “That’s him. That’s Dave.” He smiles wetly.

“Damn, Klaus. You did good.” Diego says lightly.

He laughs. “Don’t I know it. God, he was perfect. Kind, and strong, and vulnerable. And beautiful.”

And then Ben says, “Holy shit,” in shocked surprise, which was maybe not the response Klaus was expecting. He looks over at Ben, but he’s not looking at them. Klaus follows his eyes.

Dave is standing by the door.

“Holy shit!” Klaus echoes, shooting to his feet. He stares, waiting for him to disappear, but he doesn’t. He just looks at Klaus with that same old smile.

Diego is standing now, too, looking around like he’ll see whatever Klaus is staring at, like he’s ready to fight whatever ghost had just shocked the living daylights out of his brother. He’ll be touched by that, probably, when he isn’t busy staring desperately at Dave.

“You’re here,” he says in disbelief, taking an unsteady step forward, heart beating faster than it has since he quit drugs and being under gunfire.

Dave smiles wider, stepping closer, too. “I’m here.”

Klaus flails for Diego’s shoulder, unable to look away from Dave, really here, not-just-a-picture Dave. “Diego, meet Dave. Dave, this is my brother, Diego.”

He reaches out tentatively and, despite his exhaustion, his hand lands on Dave’s cheek, and doesn’t go through.


End file.
